Looking over on NewEgg they had a couple of drives for as low as $64 (if you include shipping). I was wondering "what's wrong with these drives" so I started doing a little digging. It seems that the ASUS requires you to run a .exe program in order to update the firmware. Other drives that cost more, such as the Samsung, allow you to update the firmware by simply burning a cd-rom and then putting it in the drive which is totally OS agnostic.

It might be possible via FreeDOS or Wine to run the darned exe file but ISTM I would be better off supporting companies who are trying to make life a little easier for Linux users.

I learned a long time ago to never buy the cheapest example of any hardware. Usually the same thing goes for the most expensive example (especially with video cards and such), they tend to be bleeding edge and therefore buggy.

Look at the scattering of prices for a certain capacity, chop off the bottom clutter and possibly the top cluster, and then pick something from what's left based on your needs.

I just added media-video/aacskeys to the portage tree. Lemme know if you guys have any problems building it.

If you change the java depend to virtual/jdk:1.6, it would allow it to build and run on ppc + ppc64. It built for me just fine on a ps3 using IBM's jdk, but it looks like the hypervisor is keeping access of one of the keys from me. Haven't checked out how that change would affect other arches.

Just watched the Avatar Blu-ray. Installed an ASUS BR-04B2T Blu-ray drive ($50 + free shipping from NewEgg). Used MakeMKV-1.5.8. Updated an older ebuild. Had to remove "_beta" in four places. I couldn't stream from the command-line version, makemkvcon, probably because I haven't bought it and am on the 30-day free trial. Was easy to setup streaming via the GUI.

Streamed to SMplayer with VDPAU enabled. Used an Nvidia 8400 graphics card and a 1920x1200 24" monitor. Running amd64 with an Athlon x2 5200+ processor. The CPU was running at about 30% with the clock scaled back (via OnDemand governor) to 1.0 GHz down from a max of 2.7 GHz.

Of course the picture quality was marvelous but there were a lot of annoying video artifacts. Every few minutes there would be a pixelated horizontal strip across the video for a split second where it looked like the decompression failed. I don't know what part of the processing chain was failing. It usually happened when there was a lot going on in the screen and when the entire scene was supposed to change.

I went to the Nvidia support forums and got rid of the video artifacts by following their advice and running mplayer directly via:

I'm using xbmc-9.11-r4 with the vdpau USE flag enabled. XBMC gives you access to all the languages and subtitles!

I had been giving makemkvcon "/dev/sr1" instead of "disc:0" which is why it wasn't working before. It was PEBKAC, and nothing to do with paying or not paying. But I think you might have to use the GUI version the first time in order to turn on your 30-day free trial.

There is a blu-ray plugin for XBMC that runs makemkvcon for you automatically, but I (of course) had problems with it and XBMC locked up. When you run makemkvcon as above, make sure to read the final two lines of output, which for me said:

If you are mucking about, it might use a different port number. You also might want to browse to the URL given to find out which title contains the actual movie. It might not always be title0.

Update:The Blu-ray plugin for XBMC (version 9.11) is working great now. No need to use the command line fu above. You can have it automatically play the longest title on a disc or browse a disc to play any or all of the titles. The titles don't have names but you are given the order and the length of each title. You still need to install makemkv but the UI is all through the XMBC GUI.

Are ebuilds for this stuff yet?
Seems like popular candidates.
As my system updates, I end up breaking dependencies (makemkvcon was built against libcrypto.so.0.9..
I don't see any bugs file in https://bugs.gentoo.org
Can this stuff get into portage?

Are ebuilds for this stuff yet?
Seems like popular candidates.
As my system updates, I end up breaking dependencies (makemkvcon was built against libcrypto.so.0.9..
I don't see any bugs file in https://bugs.gentoo.org
Can this stuff get into portage?

MakeMKV exists in the multimedia overlay, FYI._________________What's the worst that can happen?

It failed because the source/binaries for the older version are no longer available. Try copying the ebuild to your local overlay and just bump the version number to 1.6.3. If that doesn't work, you can use the ebuild I posted which has been working fine.

The processing keys for discs with MKB V9 ans MKB V10 are found. I can't link them but have a look at the doom9 forums to get them.

Two and a half years later, the processing keys up to MKB v25 are now out in the wild. Again, the doom9 forums are the place to begin looking._________________If ~amd64 ebuilds are cutting edge, then git-9999 ebuilds are chainsaws.
"Not everyone can ride a unicycle, does that mean we should put another wheel on it?" - Lokheed